What are some topics in games that make you uncomfortable or hesitant to recommend it to others?

Authoring General Design Discussions
22

I agree with everything you said here, Wade.

But in terms of recommending things to others, of course there are things that would give me pause. I’m slowly getting my aunt into IF, but I’d never recommend Will Not Let Me Go to her because her sister, my mother, recently died of dementia, as did her mother, and that game would be terribly upsetting to her.

Yeah, this game is a problem child for recommending. But I also loved it, and I think Gothic trope games get something of a pass, although the whole “commit suicide” message pushes the envelope for sure. But maybe this is me being defensive over having written a game based on a child-abuse, ableist Gothic trope.

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23

I think sometimes framing affects my responses to things. For many, it will be impossible to play most or every game available. In the course of their everyday lives, people often choose one game only to avoid another. This is taste, and everybody has it. If somebody chooses the cowboy game over the spaceship game, that is a fairly milquetoast thing that I am used to hearing.

And really, that’s what most people are saying. There is no IF police, nobody is going to take away anybody’s game or climb into their Instagram replies to heckle them for liking whatever. Advocating for things not to exist is a different thing, and I would personally be uncomfortable with that. But are many posters saying that?

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24

Amanda, my major WIP is a frontal attack to the current neopuritanism… but is a thing two years away.

of course, I concur with Wade and Daniel, but there’s another core issue, at least for me: one is unconfortable by himself or is an, how to say without accusation ? induced disconfort ? I’m not sure if I can explain well this point…

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio

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25

Definitely been there.

Back when XNA studio was a thing I made a version of my interpreter that ran on Xbox 360 so I could get some of my kids’ friends to try Zork together on a big projected screen. They were surprised you could plug a USB keyboard into the 360, but the game? Nah.

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26

Zork was my introduction to the genre and it’s the closest any text adventure comes to being nostalgic for me, but it feels like a jerk move to recommend it to a complete IF newbie. Feels like the equivalent of introducing someone to platformers with Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels.

Of course, not wanting to scare someone off with a game that would be considered utterly unfair by modern game design sensibilities is completely different from not wanting to offend someone or not wanting to be judged for recommending something they found distasteful.

And I agree that a lot of media contains questionable content purely for shock value, because the creator is stuck in that adolescent mindset of thinking sex, drugs, and violence makes something “mature” and doesn’t comprehend that a well written piece of G-rated media can actually be infinitely more mature than an M-rated celebration of all human vices, or because the creator is catering to an audience with said mindset… but honestly, sometimes, I’m just in the mood for a gorefest with no deeper meaning and don’t always have the mental energy to process some deep, meaningful work that might be studied in literature classes in a few centuries assuming we don’t either wipe ourselves out or achieve the singularity and society changes in a way incomprehensible to the people of today… Of course, sometimes I’m in the mood for cute girls or cute, furry creatures fighting off the embodiment of darkness with the power of love and friendship.

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27

Yes, Zork is nostalgic, but honestly not a great starting place since it was Infocom’s first game and it was made for people who were used to adventures of that era with regard to difficulty and hand-holding.

Probably one of the parser games I’d recommend for an interested new person is Violet since it has a strong and charismatic parser-voice that encourages what you’re supposed to do, and the puzzles fall as obstacles to that naturally. Even though it is moderately difficult in places, it has good sense of telling you what the goal is. The setting can easily be explained as a fantasy “escape room” experience. Plus the setting is modern so there isn’t any “figure out what a frobzul is used for” type of puzzles - unless you count the occasional Australian word-choices Violet makes - which are still more decipherable to a new player.

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I assure you from multiple ADHD people’s experience, the setting is painfully real, haha. (The bizarre appearance of zombies and aliens et al are a college campus event)

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Oh definitely! I mean “fantasy” escape room in the sense that being trapped is plot-imposed and the character is not physically locked in a room. They’re held by circumstance, not physical impairment. I think most civilians can grok “escape room” in the sense of “my goal is to leave this room” and a one-room adventure is definitely a good first choice for new players.

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Ahh, gotchu! That makes sense.

I don’t think anyone here is, but speaking from personal burns, I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet advocate for the eradication of “problematic” media and climb into people’s Instagram replies et al for creations including things like incest (when Game of Thrones is right there) (and no this is not me advocating for the eradication of GoT!) etc etc. So while I can’t speak for others here, I tend to get tetchy about the concepts of “this story shouldn’t exist” or “no one should experience it”.

(and of course those internet censorship police are following real life trends of book bans and burnings and “FPS shooters make kids violent” and all sorts of rhetoric, so…)

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31

Sure! Still, I think it would be good to take people at their word here, in this forum, unless somebody has given a reason not to. People are always doing bad things out in the world.

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32

For sure, just suggesting an explanation for why people might be replying to something that no one has said explicitly here. The ghost of other horrible happenings and all :sweat_smile:

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33

Touching on some of the points mentioned already about the use of drama for cheap effect: One more negative point that comes to mind is oversimplification. I find it difficult to keep myself interested in a narrative that presents the world as if it was black and white and all problems could be solved if it weren’t for the obstructive attitudes of Those Other People. I don’t want to lay it on individual games here so I’ll use literature for illustration:

I remember having to read dystopian literature in school back in the day. Amongst others, we read 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale. Orwell was clearly someone who had seen some things in his life that made him understand the different psychological mechanisms behind totalitarianism and the dilemma of the individual in his struggle against the institution, which we can relate to since we see how far we’re down the same road already etc. etc. Atwood was - by comparison, I’ve read worse - rambling on about some overblown petpeeves of her own, in a setting out of left field, to present an easily interpreted narrative. And that kind of thing is transparent and tedious, which defeats the author’s - usually pretty legitimate - purpose.

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34

I definitely agree with the overall point, but it’s funny you mention the Handmaid’s Tale – my wife is Iranian-American and came over here with her family to escape the revolution, and she finds that book very plausible and resonant, since a lot of the details are specifically drawn from that context. Which is just to say that there’s a margin here and different people will experience different things differently; that’s one reason why I think it’s helpful when folks who are OK with the content in a game in the abstract, but found it insensitively or superficially handled in the specific, share details about why that is (that’s generally my approach to reviewing, though, so maybe I’m just projecting out to make myself feel useful!)

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Isn’t easy to tackle the censorship and their vocal supporter without entering in politics (albeit, being dott. in Political sciences, I can perhaps tackle the issue in a neutral, scientific manner, but also I have my convictions…) so I’ll point on a generic phenomena: there’s more or less grassroots pressure toward more or less questionable politics (not only at “right” but also at “left”) and as scientist, I research if this pressure, to put it mildly, stems from grassroots or astroturf, but is indisputable that this phenomena is a component of the current global state of the 'Net, whose is, IMVHO far from sane.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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It’s the combination of Iranian-style theocracy with infertility through environmental destruction, and societal collapse from nuclear armageddon, all at the hands of the US religious right that seems somewhat compressed for dramatic effect.

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37

Games I would avoid but might hypothetically recommend to others

If you think about the examples of disturbing content frequently listed in content warnings, there is a subset of elements I definitely do not want to encounter in interactive fiction even while not begrudging people who feel differently. Sometimes it depends on whether the PC is the agent, a passive observer, or a passive participant. In many such cases I would not let my idiosyncrasies prevent me from recommending the work to someone I think might enjoy it, although I would offer to give them a trigger warning.

Games that make me uncomfortable enough that I would not want to share them with others

In my opinion the most egregious examples are games that mislead the player about provocative content, and here it is important to note that this can be done by omission. For example, if the game makes the PC a perpetrator or a victim of rape or “dubious consent” and the author does not so much as label it AIF or horror, then in my opinion that is a huge violation of the author–player contract. If I encounter a game of this sort, I will not recommend it to anyone, not even with the caveat that it is not properly labeled. Similarly, if I am playtesting for an author who has thrust me into the role of telling them that their work is improperly or inadequately labeled, I might bow out politely, but underneath my demeanor I will be seething. (Even “this beta build depicts nonconsensual acts, but I need help figuring out how to label it” is significantly better than nothing.) While appropriate genre labels might be enough to avoid raising my ire, I don’t know why authors wouldn’t use appropriate content warnings in these situations as they are the obvious, unambiguous way to avoid foisting unwelcome surprises on players or playtesters.

I probably would not want to share a game defined by pervasive use of sordid details, especially if they are all of the same character. Such a game would likely leave me feeling disturbed for some time, and if it didn’t, it would have inured me to the details the author wants me to find shocking, and neither of these is a good selling point. Mind you, I think this tends to be less a matter of intention than execution. So I would not begrudge an author who made a work like this; I would just think they chose an unfortunate path while trying to reach their goal.

Speaking of disturbing content, if a game makes suicide a win condition, I will wish I had never played it and will not recommend it to others. And I will not recommend a work that makes shooting the dog the only (obvious) solution to a puzzle, even if only to literally put the dog to sleep. (I’m looking at you, Elysium Enigma.)

Games that make me wonder why anyone would want to play them

I wonder why anyone would want to play games that include the most abhorrent behavior (child abuse, sexual violence, overtly racist acts, etc.) without contextualizing it as immoral or terror-inducing. If I’m consuming satire, I invariably find myself asking, “How long would the target of this satire be able to partake of this before realizing that they are being targeted?” The more time passes, my discomfort grows exponentially. (Thus, while I think Get Out is one of the best horror movies ever made, I find Them, a TV series that tries to be something similar, to be an absolute dumpster fire.) Satirical or not, if a work itself is not enough to tell me that the author disapproves of the awful behavior, I will be perplexed as to why anyone would want to engage with it.

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38

One thing I try to avoid is pressure to make the player character do evil things. An example would be if a game says “You have to do reprehensible thing A, or terrible thing B will happen,” and the player is like, “I can think of a better way to handle this. I want to choose option C,” and the game is like, “Option C? Never heard of it.” The game might frame this as a difficult moral choice, but part of the difficulty is just the way the choices have been limited by the author. Maybe the author doesn’t see another meaningful choice in this situation, or maybe the author is purposely not allowing a better choice because the point is for the player to feel complicit. Whatever the reason, it feels like the game is saying to me, “I’m going to pressure you into doing something that you don’t want to do and that will make you feel bad.” I’m not saying this is necessarily the author’s intention–I am talking about how it subjectively feels to me. But regardless of the author’s intention, if the effect is that it’s going to make me feel like garbage, I’m not going to want to play it.

I avoid erotic, risqué, objectifying, tasteless, or offensive content, to varying degrees.

Violent and disturbing content varies a lot. How much it bothers me depends on type, degree, purpose, context, and how it’s presented (onscreen? offscreen? Is the player expected to participate?).

In a way, playing a game requires more trust and commitment than reading a book or watching a movie, because if it’s getting to be too much for me, I usually can’t just skip ahead to the next page or the next scene. Either I have to be present and participating the entire time, or else I have to quit. Or it could be like acting the role of a character in a play, but without being able to read the script beforehand to find out if this is the kind of play I want to be in, and if this is the kind of role I want.

So for me, it’s really helpful when there’s a heads up about what to expect. Otherwise, I usually look at reviews, tags, past experiences of other games by the same author, etc. and try to make an educated guess about whether it’s something I will enjoy.

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39

Regarding Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale

I have very specific trigger buttons. While I understand The Handmaid’s Tale is a classic I cannot watch the show.

A: It’s shockingly prescient with some of the political situations today (which I won’t get into since they’re way off-topic out of this context.)

B: I have a very weird squick about “casual murder”.

Hanon's weird trigger buttons

The husband and wife serial-killer team from Canada - the “Ken and Barbie” killers who would kidnap a woman, sexually abuse them for a while before killing them. There’s one passage in the true crime where they were running late to get to their Thanksgiving holiday and there’s a sense of “hurry up and do this, we have a schedule to keep” where the wife was blow-drying her hair while her husband strangled the victim. The murder was just one chore on the “to do” list and the idea of accomplishing that before going to a happy Thanksgiving meal just breaks my head.

In the miniseries version of Handmaid’s Tale, I saw a clip that was about two women who were or were accused of being romantically involved. In the court trial their jaws were strapped - they did not participate in any way. After one of them was found guilty and sentenced to death, they loaded both of them into a van and drive them directly to a construction site where one of them is hanged by from a crane by a looping a rope around her neck over the crane hook and pushing the “lift” button which slowly hauls her up. It’s not a break-neck hanging, it’s a suffocation hanging all witnessed from inside the van by her companion who is of course inconsolable.

I get the story beats, but the callousness of it hits me weird. Like “we’re returning one of you to jail, but we’re stopping on the way to carry out this summary execution” - where it seems literally they’re having the construction workers take a five while they use the equipment. Having the other participant there just because they didn’t want to make two trips, or just out of mean-ness making her watch. And the whole idea that construction machinery is used for an execution out of practicality sends me over the edge of “tone I cannot handle”.

I know that show is really good, but the whole idea of casual-murder/convenient-execution is weirdly brutal and doesn’t sit well with me.

Same thing - (Prizzi’s Honor maybe?)…it’s somehow about mob family hit men, and there’s a scene where a husband and wife are kneeling with hands tied on the beach preparing to be shot in the head, but the guy with the gun stops to greet the other mafia friend/family member who happens by…and basically make lunch plans while this couple is experiencing their last minutes. I hate that. Especially because it’s presented as almost a comedy bit that the mob hit is interrupted and this couple have to listen to friends casually make plans in the terrifying moments before their death.

I think the TL;DR: of it is “participants or casual bystanders to impending murder for whom the murder is not the most important thing happening” is my “I might turn this off” button.

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40

The “casual murder” (or casual torture, etc.) thing always bothers me a lot too. I don’t enjoy seeing people (even fictional characters) be that callous and cruel.

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41

Something that personally dissuades me from playing, but is just due to matters of personal taste, are games that feature car crashes. I am also a little hesitant around games that heavily feature driving, but my threshold of tolerance is higher both in purely text based games, and for the latter. Sometimes, if I know I’m in a good headspace, and am able to make that decision to engage by perusing content/trigger warnings first, then I’ll play them, but typically only if I either have a pre-existing interest in the author’s body of work, or it came highly recommended by other people I know to have good taste.

Elements of a game that I find uncomfortable, which would make me not want to share it with others, are the typical things people would think to add warnings for (graphic gore, suicide, etc) though these, I’d likely preface with a warning of the pertinent content and let others make the informed decision on whether or not they’d like to play it for themselves. I’m always happy to suggest horror Twines to people, but try to be mindful and considerate of others when tailoring suggestions.

Most people play games for idiosyncratic reasons, and personal taste is just that- personal. However, there is some stuff that I do just have to quietly question as to why people would broadcast that they play them- typically simulators that position the player as the aggressor/perpetrator, of things like sexual assault, transphobia, child death, child abuse, violent misogyny, racism, etc. It would be a bit jarring to realize someone otherwise nondescript I knew enjoyed torturing simulacra of children or beating women in their spare time.

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